About Christopher James Clark, B.B.A.

Christopher James Clark, B.B.A. is an award-winning writer, consultant, and chef with specialized knowledge in nutritional science and healing cuisine. He has a Business Administration degree from the University of Michigan and formerly worked as a revenue management analyst for a Fortune 100 company. For the past decade-plus, he has been designing menus, recipes, and food concepts for restaurants and spas, coaching private clients, teaching cooking workshops worldwide, and managing the kitchen for a renowned Greek yoga resort. Clark is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning book, Nutritional Grail.

It afflicts an estimated 20 to 30% of people in Western countries, yet most people have never heard about nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), nor have they heard about nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), an advanced form of NAFLD, which afflicts around 17% of the population.1,2,3 Pharmaceutical companies, however, are rushing to develop drugs for these lifestyle-related diseases. Within the next 5 years, the market for such drugs is expected to swell to $8 billion.4 What are these diseases and why are they so unknown? In this article, we’ll answer those questions, while also examining why the Paleo diet can play a…

Every four years, the world comes together to celebrate the Olympic games. Olympic sports are broadly classified as either team- or individually-based. Soccer and volleyball, for example, are team sports, whereas boxing and tennis are more individual. With individual sports, coaches, trainers, and physical therapists play supporting roles to the individual who gets the spotlight. With team sports, winning usually requires strong team dynamics and success stories are almost always collaborative efforts. Nutrition is the same way. We often focus on certain key nutrients without understanding the importance of nutrient interactions, ratios, and synergies. Calcium is an excellent example. Most…

Recently archaeologists in northeast Jordan have discovered the oldest known tools with identifiable protein residues—the residual remains of butchered animals.1 Between 2013 and 2015, a team of archeologists excavated 7,000 tools used by hominins around 250,000 years ago. These tools provide significant insights into the hunting sophistication of early proto-humans. More importantly, the study further discredits the myth that early hominins were predominantly vegetarians. First, let’s examine what this new archeological evidence reveals about ancient hominins from present-day Jordan. The specific location is the Azraq Basin of Jordan’s Eastern Desert, a hominin habitat for the past 300,000 years. Its first…

It seems that almost daily we’re bombarded with food and marketing that claims “superior” anti-oxidant health benefits. But in the process of reading about all these super-foods, have you ever questioned what exactly antioxidants do? To understanding their importance we first need to dig a little deeper and gain some basic knowledge about anti-oxidants’ counterpart – free radicals. Antioxidants are generally cast as nutritional heroes, whereas free radicals are viewed as villains, but in reality, both are essential to health. Neither is inherently good or bad. Our diet and lifestyle choices, however, are critically important because those choices maintain the…

In Part 1 of this 2-part series, we defined the microbiome and outlined its many functions. In Part 2, we’ll compare the microbiomes of contemporary populations with those of our ancestors, we’ll see how the Paleo lifestyle benefits the microbiome, and we’ll examine the claims of a prominent Paleo critic who believes the exclusion of grains detracts from microbiome health. Learning from Hunter-Gatherers In Part 1, we learned that bacterial species diversity is key to microbiome health. As diversity decreases, the microbiome becomes less robust and less capable of optimally performing its many duties. To assess the impact of diet…

In 2001, Nobel-prize winning biologist Joshua Lederberg coined the term “microbiome, to signify the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share our body space and had been all but ignored as determinants of health and disease.”1 Fifteen years later, the microbiome has become one of the most important areas of nutrition research. For example, in 2007, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), which was funded to the tune of $170 million over five years of research. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we’ll examine what the microbiome is, what it…

Heart disease isn’t something most kids think about. When I was growing up, however, it was always on my radar. My family and I spent countless hours at Akron General, the hospital in Akron, Ohio, where my grandmother was routinely a patient. She suffered her first heart attack when I was 3 years old and finally succumbed to heart disease fifteen years later. Her grace and fortitude deeply inspired me. Never during all those years did I hear her complain or pity herself. She enjoyed every moment of her life, refusing to live in fear. For me, however, heart disease,…

It’s no secret that vegetarian diets pose unique nutritional challenges. Protein, iron, vitamin D, and vitamin B12, for example, are nutrients vegetarians typically struggle to obtain optimally. Often overlooked, however, are the important differences between animal and vegetable foods with respect to essential fatty acids (EFAs). As we’ll see, vegetable EFA sources are inferior to animal sources and, according to research recently conducted by Cornell University scientists, these shortcomings promote genetic adaptations, which make intergenerational vegetarians more prone to inflammation-related diseases, particularly cancer and heart disease 1. The EFA Basics The only fatty acids considered “essential” are polyunsaturated fatty acids…

It’s often said that meat made us human. Meat allowed for larger brains and greater intelligence, not to mention more time for pursuits other than chewing. So how did a species that ate relatively little meat 2.6 million years ago evolve into one that depended on meat and was radically transformed by its consumption? Do we owe this success to fire and our learned ability to cook? Or does a more rudimental form of “cooking” deserve the credit? As every chef knows, you don’t just toss whole vegetables and large slabs of meat into the casserole. You have to slice…

Paleo critics are always voicing unsubstantiated claims. Their attacks are easily countered, but they sometimes create confusion and discouragement, especially for those who are new to Paleo. The British Dietetic Association, for example, has called Paleo a “time consuming, socially-isolating diet.” If you’re just starting out with Paleo, it’s probably better to get your advice from people who actually follow the lifestyle, not from critics who simply parrot talking points. The Paleo Diet shouldn’t be time consuming or socially isolating, nor should it be overly expensive. Above all, the Paleo Diet is flexible. Whatever your personal circumstances, you can customize…

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